Page 258 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 7 March 2007
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together their greenhouse gas strategy. If they want to call it a climate change strategy, yes, that is fine, but they have not been able to put it on the table.
I was recently minister for the environment and I bring to this debate some of the legacy that the Carnell and Humphries governments put in this place. I am very conscious of our achievement. We were the first jurisdiction in this country, courtesy of the Liberal government, to sign up to Kyoto and were the first jurisdiction in this country, courtesy of the Liberal government, to put a greenhouse gas strategy on the table.
When you go through the list of our achievements in the environment, you see we not only have a strong commitment to it, we carried through on it; we put in place a greenhouse gas strategy with targets; we set up NOWaste by 2010, which has formed an entire industry around the world; we put in place the firewood strategy, EER, the water legislation and the hot-water tune-up program; we started to rehabilitate rivers; we got rid of the woody weeds; we set up the action plans for endangered species and ecosystems and did the review on them, all 24 of them; we had feral animal management; we put land back into the reserves, places like East O’Malley, and confirmed that Jerrabomberra would never be built on; we had the methane gas capture at the tip. The list goes on and on. It is that number of initiatives during the period of the previous government that is unmatched by the current government and, I suspect, will never be matched by the current government. The Chief Minister said the Minister for Planning is going to speak about this.
We are the government that put in high-quality design and sustainability principles to address these issues. We did it years ago. We helped with green power; we set up the green fleet; we signed the packaging covenant; we started the grey-water mining in North Canberra and then extended it where we could. In overall terms, when you compare what we achieved as a government with what this government has achieved, what you see, truly, is words and no action whatsoever.
Mr Hargreaves has moved his amendment, which we will be objecting to. We think it does not address the issues seriously. Mr Hargreaves said something important: this cannot be addressed by government alone. I agree. It has to be addressed by the community. We saw, particularly during the Asian meltdown in the late 1990s, talk that recycling by the community, particularly in recycling their waste paper, was at risk and that paper would go to the tip. The community was outraged. They wanted guarantees that their efforts were going to be fruitful, and we were happy to give those guarantees.
The government must show leadership. What it lacked under the previous environment minister, the Chief Minister, was leadership on these issues. They have rested on our laurels because we set up most of what was achieved. But they have not done a lot. Mr Hargreaves referred earlier to the list of things that they achieved. The list was pretty short and pretty well non-momentous. It is about movement; it is about making things happen. At the rate we are going, if the doomsayers are correct and the glaciers are all melting, the glaciers will be melted before this government gets anything in place on the entire issue of sustainability, greenhouse gas and climate change because their rate of change will be glacial. You may well have a beachfront
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